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Rethinking the music player

An exploration of physicality, interaction, and making digital music feel a little more human.

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What inspired this project?

[Untitled] app

I came across Untitled on X, and something about it stuck with me. I was drawn to how it borrowed from things that felt physical and familiar, bringing a sense of tactility into a digital space.


It made me wonder what my own interpretation of a music player might look and feel like.

Not necessarily a better one.


Just a different one.

I came across a tweet by one of my favorite designers, Rauno Freiberg, showcasing a brilliant interaction. He used the text caret to provide visual feedback when the
⇧ Shift or Caps Lock keys were pressed. This inspired me to explore how else can we communicate hidden system states using the existing constraints of a text input?

Ideation

What else could listening to music feel like?

I didn't start with a brief or a problem to solve. I started with a question:


What happens when a digital music player starts behaving more like something you can touch?

Turning something. Sliding something. Watching it move and respond.


Most music interfaces rely on the same familiar patterns: lists, grids, playback bars, and buttons.

They are efficient, but I wanted to explore something more tactile and expressive.

So instead of starting with features, I started with interactions.

What could move?

What could respond?

What could make the listener feel more involved?

Something gets lost between physical and digital.

Digital music has made listening effortless.

But as everything becomes faster, listening can also become passive.

This exploration introduces small moments of participation, not to recreate a turntable, but to reinterpret familiar gestures in a digital space.

The outcome

The interactions

Throughout the project, I experimented with movement, direct manipulation and physical references.

Some ideas felt playful. Others felt unnecessary. The goal wasn't realism, but finding interactions that felt intuitive while making music feel more engaging.

Inspired by Rauno's focus on the text caret, I explored how other elements of the input field could provide visual feedback. I landed on the borders. I asked my self "If the text caret can react, what about the boundaries of the input field?"

In this prototype, border thickness acts as the indicator for the ⇧ Shift and Caps Lock keys. A lighter thickening for the momentary ⇧ Shift state is applied, while a heavier one for the persistent Caps Lock state. Instead of adding new UI clutter like icons or tooltips, this approach utilizes the existing structural elements of the component to convey information.

Explorations like this force me to step outside standard interaction paradigms and think creatively about visual feedback.

Finding a record

Every listening session starts with finding something to play. I wanted users to have two equally natural ways to do that, searching when they know what they're looking for, or browsing when they don't.

The search bar expands with a morphing transition, drawing focus without taking the user away from the collection. As they type, the records automatically move to the closest matching result, connecting search directly to the browsing experience.

Browsing is designed to feel like moving through a record collection rather than scanning a list.

Users can swipe between records or use the left and right arrow keys to move through the collection. Keeping neighbouring records partially visible creates a sense of continuity and hints at what comes next.

The keyboard controls extend the same directional logic beyond browsing: press down to play the selected record, and up to stop playback.

Controlling the playback

Instead of using a standard play button, playback begins by dragging the record towards the tonearm.

As the record approaches, the tonearm rotates to meet it, creating a subtle interaction between the two elements rather than relying on a single animated object. The surrounding UI also adapts to the vinyl moving down to the tonearm.

The gesture isn't intended to recreate a turntable exactly. Instead, it borrows a familiar physical relationship to make starting music feel more deliberate.

Scrubbing through the track

Once the record is playing, the interaction doesn't end.

The record itself becomes the playback control mirroring the function of the progress bar. Dragging it left or right scrubs through the track, turning a familiar media control into a direct manipulation of the object already on screen.

By keeping the interaction centred around the record, the experience feels more continuous than switching between separate controls. Standard controls remain available for precision and familiarity, while scrubbing the vinyl adds a more tactile and playful alternative.

I also kept the controls familiar, but made them responsive to the listener’s intent. Instead of displaying every option at once or opening detached menus, controls expand from where the interaction begins. Volume becomes a slider, while playback modes unfold within the same element.


This keeps the default interface compact while maintaining a sense of continuity across the experience.

Extending the interaction language

I wanted even the smallest details of the interface to feel connected to the experience. The logo responds on hover by spinning, echoing the motion of the vinyl itself.

It does not add new functionality, but reinforces the visual language of the player and helps the interface feel more cohesive, playful, and alive.

Notes

Where this exploration led

This project was less about arriving at the perfect music player and more about following an interaction idea as far as I could.

It gave me space to experiment with motion, physical references and small moments of feedback without the constraints of a conventional product brief.

Some interactions were practical, while others existed simply to make the experience feel more playful. Together, they helped me explore how digital interfaces can remain intuitive while still carrying personality.

The exploration ends here for now, but the question remains: how else might familiar digital actions be made to feel more intentional?

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